February 28, 2015

There's a new trailer for the upcoming Batman: Arkham Knight turning heads online this week as the villainous Scarecrow returns to Gotham City for his final revenge. Having brought the other surviving members of Batman's Rogues Gallery together for one last strike, they intend to conquer the city and finally... take... their reven- I'm sorry, but Scarecrow's voice in that trailer is driving me crazy over here. It sounds so familiar. He'd been recast since his last speaking appearance in the original Arkham Asylum, and this new performance is so much creepier, so much more intimidating than before, but I know that I know that voice from somewhere... Of course! It's John Noble, best remembered as the mad scientist protagonist of Fringe, Dr. Walter Bishop. He elevates everything he's in. I was already looking forward to Arkham Knight, but now I'm more interested and excited about it than ever. Arkham Knight is due out on June 2, 2015.

February 23, 2015

The green flag has dropped on this week's episode of the Power Button podcast in which Blake Grundman and I take some of our favorite racing games for a spin. We discuss the merits of popular titles like Burnout Paradise, Need for Speed, Mario Kart, Mega Man Battle & Chase, Sonic Riders, Diddy Kong Racing, and many more. Join us for the checkered flag shocker in which the final showdown of Mario Kart versus Diddy Kong Racing is settled once and for all. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via
, you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton. Next Time: It's our largest podcast panel ever as writers from the world of Mega Man join us to discuss writing and editing for the blue bomber.

February 20, 2015

UPDATE: We received a lot of great questions via Twitter and were able to ask them all. Listen for the answers on a future episode of the podcast!

READY? After months of lead-in, it's finally time. We're recording the big Mega Man episode of the Power Button podcast tonight in which we're joined by three of the biggest voices in Mega Man publications: Ian Flynn (the writer behind Archie's Mega Man comics), Matt Moylan (Managing Editor of UDON Entertainment, publisher of blue bomber art books), and David Oxford (author of The Robot Master Field Guide). You've heard them all separately on pastshows, but this is the main mega event! Do you have a question for them about writing for or about Capcom's beloved franchise? Ask it now! We'll include the best questions on the show. Send us your questions by replying below, sending a tweet to @PressTheButtons, or calling our trusty voicemail hotline at (720) 722-2781 and leaving a brief message. You may just hear yourself on the air!

February 15, 2015

In honor of Valentine's Day we're spending this week's episode of the Power Button podcast discussing some of our favorite gaming relationships: the romances, the platonic pals, the bromances, and beyond. Mario/Peach? Got it. Link/Zelda? Well, which one? Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan's all-star team-up? Covered. The Walking Dead, EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, Gears of War, and many more all get their due. Listen to it with someone special. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via
, you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton. Next Time: The race is on as we discuss our favorite driving games. Join us when the green flag drops!

February 11, 2015

Capcom's famous Street Fighter II has been ported to all kinds of gaming hardware from classic to modern, but the strangest and most unlikely place it's appeared so far has to be on Nintendo's quickly discontinued Virtual Boy platform. It's not an official product, of course; fans have brought the game to the failed system under the title Hyper Fighting. Kotaku has compiled the story:

Homebrew games have existed in the still-active Virtual Boy community for a while now, and someone finally took a shot at making Street Fighter II. The project has been floating around for a few years, but only recently came to fruition and into the hands of a few lucky collectors.

It's a complete release, too, with custom cartridges and boxes. Even though Nintendo moved on from the Virtual Boy long ago, I'm glad to see it still has a following out there and inspires enough interest to see the best games of its generation ported to it. Passion for projects like this is what keeps the fan community going.

February 08, 2015

Hey, you! Yeah, you, the person reading this. You wanna listen to a video game podcast? This week on Power Button, we're talking about games that reach out to break the fourth wall and directly address or interact with the player rather than the protagonist. Eternal Darkness, Sonic the Hedgehog, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Super Mario 64, Deadpool, Metal Gear Solid, The Simpsons Game, and other favorite games are brought up and discussed all for the benefit of you, the audience. We hope you enjoy this dive through the fourth wall. Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via
, you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton. Next Time: We celebrate gaming's best relationships on our Valentine's Day special.

February 06, 2015

After years of hearing about Nintendo's refusal to license its characters out to Hollywood following the financial disaster that was 1993's Super Mario Bros. film, imagine how shocked we all were today to learn that Netflix and Nintendo are working on a live-action television series based on The Legend of Zelda. Everyone's hungry for details, but here's all the Wall Street Journal can tell us so far:

The video streaming service is in the early stages of developing a live action series based on Zelda, about an ordinary boy named Link who must rescue a princess named Zelda and save a fantasy world called Hyrule, said a person familiar with the matter. As it seeks writers to work on the show, Netflix is describing it as Game of Thrones for a family audience, this person said.

As it is still seeking a writer to work on the series, Netflix has a long road to travel before a Legend of Zelda series actually becomes a reality. It’s also possible that Netflix or Nintendo will kill the project before it gets off the ground.

So this could either end up as an award-winning smash hit or a dead project that never sees the light of day. There's so many unknowns here that it's dangerous to get too excited, but it's so difficult not to feel at least a little jazzed. A Zelda TV show! There's so much potential here, although if you take the sex and brutality out of Game of Thrones, there's not much left. Netflix's Zelda series will have to find its own way separate from that quick pitch line, but there's a lot of source material from which to mine. Maybe we'll finally see this classic scene in live action!

Yeah, I never pass up a chance to remind you that happened. Anyway, hardcore fans are surely working up dream ideas as we speak, but it would be in Netflix's benefit to keep it simple at the start. Base the plot around the original Nintendo Entertainment System game or A Link to the Past. Jumping right into a flooded Hyrule (Wind Waker) or werewolf antics (Twilight Princess) could be dangerous. Or, with Nintendo's assistance, maybe the development team should just right into a plot based off of the upcoming new Wii U game. Creative cross-promotional synergy! Can you feel it?

February 04, 2015

If you think it's difficult to track down regular amiibo figurines, just wait until Nintendo releases special gold and silver variants of beloved characters like Mario. A little snooping around Nintendo's website today revealed the existence of the special edition versions, although there's no word on when or where you'll see them available (and Nintendo has removed the PDFs that revealed all of this in the first place). I've heard speculation that these are everything from contest prizes to extremely limited edition items for sale to retailer exclusives to the final Club Nintendo platinum and gold level prizes for this year. Here's what Engadget knows:

An eagle-eyed NeoGAF poster dug up the furtive figurines on Nintendo's site, but it looks like the box art is all the info we've got so far. We've asked Nintendo what's up, but for now you can start prepping your riot gear to ensure you make it out of the store alive when the bloodbath for these toys begins. Nintendo's already sold more than 2.6 million Amiibo, and the demand doesn't appear to be stopping anytime soon.

I'm sure the eBay scalpers are salivating even as we speak. Personally, I'm hoping that these become the final Club Nintendo prizes. That seems to be the only way that average folks like you and me will ever have a chance to own one of them. If they're contest prizes, someone will cheat the leaderboards or flood the contest with bogus entries; if they're for sale somewhere, scalpers will snatch them all up before the rest of us even know that they're available. It's just the way the amiibo market works, sadly. If figurines like Marth and Wii Fit Trainer represent an uncommon allotment, I can't imagine how rare the gold and silver figurines could possible be. Is it somehow possible to manufacture a negative number of an item?